OGRE,by Jason A. Zwiker

TO APPEAR IN "THE BARBARIAN" ANTHOLOGY

has "5752" words.

The sky was lost in a rancid smear, like lilacs gone to rot,
heavy with rain. Philip, weary from walking the long mountain path, huffed in
frustration. The storm was approaching faster than he’d anticipated. In fact,
approaching no longer seemed the proper word. The air felt colder, all at once.
The first few drops of water hit on his shoulder, on his cheek, and in the dry
dirt at his feet.
There was nothing to be done for it now but run for cover.
He’d set his eyes on a nearby grove of trees when, by chance, he noticed, for
the first time, a castle in the distance, just around the bend. It’s a coin
toss, he thought. But it really wasn’t, was it?
He ran.
The sky opened up before he was halfway there. He was
drenched (soaked to the bone, his mother would have said), long before his
knuckles hit that ancient wooden door.
He didn’t have to wait for long.
“You are fortunate,” the lord of the castle said, opening
the door wide and gazing down on him. “It is not easy to walk these paths when
the rain comes.”
“Not easy in good weather,” Philip replied. He was taken
aback by the size of the man. He was as broad of shoulder as an ox. The top of
Philip’s head only reached the level of his chest. Were it not for the precise
cut and obvious expense of his clothing, to say nothing of his home, which
suggested great wealth, Philip might rather have taken his chances with the
rain. “Well, ah, well, it seems…”
“You need shelter from the rain.” The giant stepped back
graciously and waved his arm inwards as a sign of welcome.
Oaths of hospitality were taken seriously in this region –
Philip had lectured on this very topic while in Ingolstadt (or was it Mainz?) –
and besides, already trees in the distance were bending and swaying like
dancers. This was no light summer squall. Before long, this would be what they
called in Spain a wind that de-horned goats. He followed him into the castle
and the great door closed behind them.
“I am Go’mago’,” his host said, or something close to that.
Gawr-magoc? He leaned forward slightly, favoring his left leg with a black cane
as thick, heavy, and knotted as a war club.
The word strange shot to Philip’s lips, but he caught it on
his tongue before it was spoken. It was difficult to hear clearly in this
gathering storm. “Philip,” he said, at the edge of a shout. “I’m pleased to
make your acquaintance. I was told there’s a village nearby. I was hoping to
find it before the storm.”
A dark smile crossed the giant’s face, or perhaps it was
only the flickering of the candles ensconced on the walls. “I know this
village. A morning’s walk will take you there, tomorrow, after this passes.”
Philip was given towels and dry clothing and brought to a
room warmed by a vast fireplace. The journey had been disconcerting thus far,
almost every step of the way. This was simply another straw tossed on an
ever-growing pile. How could he have misread the sky? He’d been making his way
through the world by relying on cues from the weather and from reading the
expressions on faces in crowds since he was a boy.
A good horse, gold, a favorite shirt, and very nearly his
life after a misunderstanding involving a medicinal poultice and a syphilitic
nobleman with a plantar-palmer rash: losing treasured things had been the theme
of these last few weeks. He’d count chancing upon the castle as good fortune
and hope that it augured a turn in the right direction for him.
He sighed. The error had been his. That much was true. He’d
been working too many hours, traveling in the time in-between, and simply mixed
the wrong ingredients. Besides, the bright blue stain left by the poultice on
those noble hands and feet would fade in ten days, give or take. He laughed,
quietly, to himself. Best to take the long way around and avoid that particular
city on his way home when all of this done.
When he stepped back into the main body of the room, he
noticed that wine and a heavy tray of bread, cheese, and meat awaited him on a
table near the fireplace. Philip caught a shadow out of the corner of his eye,
as a second occupant of the castle vanished into the shadows.
“Hello?”
Outside, the wind howled and rain washed over the castle in
waves. He timed them. The wind and rain seemed to strike in 3/4 time, like a
polonaise. He smiled, unhappily, and then set upon the wine and the food with
the vigor of a man who hadn’t eaten all day, which is precisely what he was.
After, he settled into a chair near the fire. The echoing
beat of his host’s footfalls and the tap of that heavy cane grew near. At least
I’ll hear him coming, Philip thought, deliberately avoiding the memory of the
slim shadow that delivered the serving tray without so much as a whisper.
He looked around, as if noticing where he was for the first
time.
It was a trophy room of sorts. The severed heads of beasts
on plaques lined the stone walls. A silent array of combat helmets, some so
exotic that he could only guess at their origins, others common to the many
nations he had visited and easily recognizable, rested along the mantle. There
were axes, swords, spears and shields in every corner, polished and displayed
with such care that he whistled out the words:
“A curator, that’s what you are. This would make a fine
museum.”
His host laughed as he stepped into the room. Nothing so
noble, Philip was assured. He was a retired military officer with the means to
nurture his interests. That was all. Allow an aging man his pleasures.
“Even so,” Philip said. He described his own work, traveling
from place to place and collecting the stories, rhymes, and songs of the
people. “I made it as far as the Holy Land when I was younger. That was a
harrowing journey. What I mean is that traveling through the lands between here
and there was… an adventure.” This earned him a nod and a smirk from his host,
nothing more. He wasn’t pressed for details, which was fortunate, because he’d
never actually visited the Holy Land, only read and dreamed of doing so. “I’ve
never crossed the ocean, but wouldn’t that be something? The stories I’ve
heard…” He shook his head and added, “Don’t have the legs for it, that’s the problem.”
The personal history he shared was such an artful blend of
fact and fiction that even he himself would have to go at it with a comb for
hours to untangle all of the threads. Details about how he would entertain the
crowds and they would put coin in his sack
- or when there was no need for that, he would preach the Gospel or set
bones, let blood, and mix medicines for the ailing – were left out completely.
His qualifications in the preacher and doctor trades were… complicated.
“I occasionally lecture at universities,” he said. “When
they’ll have me. I’ve written extensively on the subject of the occult world.”
Many - including (especially) his own family - had dismissed
his mission as a kind of idleness, but his host nodded in understanding and
said this:
“Without stories, man would not know what he saw reflected
in the mirror.”
Philip smiled. A towering terror, this one was, but he was
also a man who understood. The thunder and rush of rain outside felt long away.
He did not, however, for reasons he could not explain to himself, tell his host
of the precise reason he’d ventured into the forbidding mountains of this
region. To gather accounts of the dark tale of a man who dined on other men,
whose hunger even led him, one winter, to sup on the bones of his own wife and
children.
“Let me show you something.” His host uncurled an ancient,
sun-faded map of a vast landscape across the hardwood table in one corner of
the room, and brought a candle closer to aid the traveler’s eyes.
Intrigued, Philip wandered over. The map described mountains
and valleys, wide, flowing rivers, fertile plains, and dread forests and spoke
as well of many things both above and below the surface. In the legend, he saw
only one word: Homem.
“Curious,” he said.
“The mountains seem to be very different from the ocean
floor and the inside of a volcano very different from a field of sunflowers,”
he said, running a sausage-like finger, fitted with a chunky ring of gold,
across the brittle paper. “Has it never occurred to you, though, that these are
various ways in which parts of the very same essential nature may be expressed?
That raw materials, time, place, and circumstance are all that separate the
forest from the plain?”
Philip became keenly aware of his heart beating too loud,
too fast. He concealed this by drinking deeply from his glass of wine.
“The serene, snow-swept peak of the mountain believes that
it could never have been otherwise, that the rotted bog is what it is and that
he himself is something else altogether.”
“You said he.”
“Did I?”
“Yes,” Philip said. His felt the room go loose all around
him. “I had better sit back down.”
“The wine is strong.”
That certainly was so.
Later, in the dead of night, long after Philip had retired
to the bedchamber provided to him, the shadows moved. Philip was certain of
that. He’d awoken after only a few fitful hours of sleep. The world outside was
still deep in darkness, the storm dwindling down to light rainfall. He watched
the shadows for a very long time before he was able to convince himself that he
had not seen what he knew he had seen.
He pulled the fine sheets, smooth as butter, to his chin and
tried to shut off the agitation in his head. He followed his breath, a trick
he’d learned from a holy man in the East (well, a Holy Man from the East,
anyway, who he met in Barcelona), until he was nearly at the edge of sleep.
White as snow, that’s how he pictured it, the air he
breathed rushing deep inside of him and cooling the edges of his anxieties.
Whenever a worry would slip into his awareness (like that shadow in the corner,
the height of a child, but slim as a skeleton and ragged around the joints), he
simply marked its presence (I see you) and let his cool breath wrap around it.
There is only your breath, flowing in and out. There is nothing
else. When the trick worked, it worked well. When it did not…
Something cold and damp brushed back a curl of his hair.
“Hello?” he said, quickly sitting up straight in bed. His
voice broke as he said it. His fingertips, behind him, searched for the knife
he always slipped beneath his pillow while his eyes scanned the darkness.
He found the knife, gripped it tightly, and asked again:
“Hello?”
But there was no answer. There was only darkness, until
dawn.
In the morning, once the sun returned to make the pools of
water on the trails sparkle like magic against the lush green, he breakfasted
with his host and was soon returned on his path with fresh-baked bread for his
journey. As the castle receded into the distance, a sense that can only be
described as a goose stepping on his grave washed over him.
It wasn’t long before he found the village he’d been
seeking.
Walking the narrow cobblestone streets, he admired the neat
rows of timber-framed buildings, the pale shades of blue, brown, and yellow
before the backdrop of the mountains. This place would offer an extraordinary
view on a winter evening, with snow billowing through the market square,
casting everything in a cold serenity. A bittersweet wave of nostalgia washed
over him. It had been far too long since he’d last seen his own home. Life,
he’d long ago realized, was like wandering a labyrinth. As soon as you thought
your goal was in sight, the path circled outwards again and carried you further
from it. You simply had to keep walking and trust in the path, keeping walking
and trust in the path. Philip had been walking the path of the nomadic scholar
for a very long time. He wondered how long his trust would hold out. Still, it
was the middle of summer, and there was much work to be done.
As soon as this thought had swept through his mind, a sword
shot out from an alleyway and stabbed against his hip.
“Hey!” Philip said, hopping away from the blade. It was a
toy sword, only wood, in the hands of a little boy in dusty clothes.
“Got you, you vagabond!”
“Well, I can see that you have,” he said with a laugh. He
was just about to tousle the boy’s hair when a plump old woman leaned out of a
window and yelled.
“Imp! What have you been told about murdering potential
customers in the street?”
“Sorry, mum,” the boy yelled, though his freckled face was
wide in a grin. Impish, indeed.
“Is your leg all right, sir?”
Philip laughed. “Oh, it’s fine. Luckily, I’ve studied a
pinch of medicine in my time. I’ll dress my wounds before supper and count
myself a fortunate man to have survived against such a formidable foe.”
The boy danced on his toes, making his wooden sword slice
the air with deft flicks of his wrist.
“Ah, you’ll swat the wrong man with that one day,” she said.
“Then your hide will be good and tanned.”
Philip laughed as the boy ran off. “Traveler’s Rest,” he
said, smiling his famous smile - the one that never… well, perhaps
occasionally… failed him - and pointing to the sign above and to the left of
the old woman’s head, hoping his translation and pronunciation were passable.
“Is this where I might find a room and a meal?”
It was indeed. As he had just enough gold left in his
pocket, the arrangements were made.
Most of the people he broke bread with over the following
days told him stories, but he had the sense that none told all he knew. He felt
his luck had changed when he sat down with the retired surgeon.
“Years have passed.” The old man’s hands trembled when they
were idle, but became eerily steady whenever he performed some well practiced
task, such as buttoning his jacket or sketching a map for the traveler. He’d
lived in this village all his life. The only time he’d been away, he explained,
was for a brief military service and university. “Those were terrible days.”
“You called him the Ogre?”
“I’d call him the Devil!” Here, he paused to cross himself,
in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
Philip shifted his papers. The sky was the most brilliant
shade of blue today, with just the slightest cool breeze coming in from the
north. Two little girls chased each other, giggling, down the street near the
apothecary; a game of tag. Idyllic, he thought.
But wasn’t it all too perfect? This was the next thought
that followed in his head. Characters popping into view at precisely the right
time, like the automaton birds of a cuckoo clock. He swatted the thought away.
I see you.
“I was just a boy then. My father was town surgeon before
me. Most of the time, he cut hair, but he also set bones and put wounds to
right whenever there was an accident or some young man’s temper got the best of
him.”
At this point in the story, something shifted in his eyes.
It had been far worse once, he allowed that. The tales told
by his father, by his grandfather, from the days when the man they called the
Ogre was young, still sowing his oats. “He’s far longer lived than the rest of
us, you see. He ages more slowly. I don’t know why. I’ve never known why. I’m
the man people ask when they have a question about how living things work.
Well, myself and Josef in the apothecary, of course. But I don’t know the why
of that. It’s just the way of it.”
Philip started to speak, but thought better of it. He looked
directly into the old man’s pale blue eyes. Those eyes were sharp, even if the
rest of him showed the weight of nearly a century’s walk upon the earth. Those
eyes commanded attention.
But Philip couldn’t shake the thought that those were not
the only eyes upon him.
The entire village had the feeling of being… contained, like
a scene in a fishbowl.
“Years ago. That was the last time any of us saw him.
Whenever he made his way to the village, there was trouble. Sometimes the
trouble was obvious, sometimes not. Sometimes words flew fast in the tavern and
a young man would never be seen again. It wasn’t like the old days, when he and
his kind – oh, yes, there were more of them long ago. He’s the last of a family
that used to terrorize these mountains in centuries past – when they used to
wander into town and wreak havoc on all who were too slow to simply hand them
what they wanted.”
The surgeon spun a tale of harrowing nights, families
locking themselves in cellars and commanding their children to be silent while
great shadows passed through the streets, of drunken revelries and fistfights
that left doors splintered and dangling loose on single hinges. The most
peaceful days for the mountain villages were times of great conflict in the
wider world. Whenever the word war was whispered, it was understood that the
Ogre would ready his horses and find his way, by land or by sea, to wherever in
the world his axe was most welcome.
“He hired himself out; a mercenary. And he were well-paid,
because who could stand against him? Most of that pay went for drink and food
and orgies at the end, I imagine. I didn’t keep his books, who am I to say? But
the way it was told to me, when the statesmen sat together at table and signed
treaties to put an end to hostilities, the eyes of the Ogre would gloss over
and he would seek other entertainment. That usually meant trouble for the
nearest towns and villages.”
“And he consumed the flesh of other men? This part of the
story is true?”
“Yes. But here is something else you might find of
interest.”
What the surgeon said next would trouble his thoughts until
the end of his days.
Later that evening, the tavern in the inn was fairly
roaring. Philip lit a few salts in the fireplace and the flames danced with an
eerie green glow, followed by blue, violet, and white, each to punctuate key
moments in the ghost story he was telling. It was the least from his bag of tricks.
Later, he made his way through the room, exchanging
pleasantries with those he’d already met, adding to his collected tales of the
Ogre here and there. Most of the yes, I’ve seen him, wandering the woods
stories from the young men, he filed away as apocryphal. He tossed first person
accounts of young toughs scaring the brute away out as sheer bombast. Of
course, he never said so directly. He was ever the charming one: cordial and
quick with a kind word. It was how he’d fared so well thus far along a path on
which he was always the stranger in town, newly arrived and asking questions.
He noticed, not for the first time that evening, a young
woman, dark-haired, beautiful. She glanced his way and their eyes met for just
a touch too long. She blushed and dropped her eyes. Philip raised his eyebrows,
tilted his head to the side in thought.
“We could always use a handsome young schoolmaster around
here,” Old Widow Nowak said, leaning over the counter, her plump arms crossed,
a towel wrapped around one hand. “If you’re trying to think of a reason to
stay, that is.”
Philip looked across the room. He saw the crisp white back
of the young woman’s blouse, disappearing into the crowd. He raised a hand,
half-heartedly, to call her over. But she only turned her head, smiled once,
and was gone.
He’d return to that memory, regretting youthful hesitation,
all his life.
He said his goodbyes and set out the very next morning,
following a road on the side of the mountain opposite from the one he’d
travelled to get here. It was proof that his smile and his ease with words were
not always equal to the tasks he set before himself. His personal map of the
world was replete with places he ought to avoid returning to in the future.
Still, he’d gathered stories aplenty. Enough, when added to
the material he’d compiled from other towns and villages in the region, to
round out the chapter on the Ogre in his upcoming book.
For the last few hours, he’d been following the sound of
running water off to the side, a mountain stream. Finally, he wandered to the
edge of the embankment and took a break to drink some water, to nibble at an
apple, to think.
By the time he finished, he’d already composed a good
opening for the chapter in his head. So good, in fact, that it might be worth
the time to take a break from walking, sit down, and write for a while. The
pieces were all fitting together well, each edge of the story snug to another.
Except that it was too neat, too snug.
He stopped moving and gazed off into the blue and purple
blurs that were the mountaintops in the distance. He suddenly had the sense of having listened
to actors reading from a carefully prepared script, each villager saying
precisely what he or she had been told to say.
A chill washed over him.
Absurd. And yet…
He started to turn, to look back along the road to the
village, a half-formed thought in his head, when a great shadow blotted out the
sun. “Hey!” he said, backing away in fear, but his foot sank through the soft
mud at the edge and he fell to the rocks below.
Evil: that was the word that jumped into his head when
thought returned. He heard the sound of devils drumming, felt himself turning,
burning. His eyelids felt glued down, heavy as shells. He forced them open
anyway, tried to wipe the grit from their edges, but could not. His hands and
feet were bound, behind him. The stars, glittering with malice in the blackness
of the heavens, slowly turned before him, then forest, then fire. He snapped
his eyes shut, felt the flames lick his chest. His skin reddened, blistered,
and bubbled.
“Where are my clothes?”
The other side of the forest appeared and then, again, after
a while, the stars as he was turned, around and around, on the spit.
“You don’t have to… you don’t have to do this…” he screamed.
Then, sick and confused, he added: “These are just birds following the pins on
a barrel… I won’t tell anyone…”
A warm, wet brush touched against his feet and ran upwards
to his chin. The bristles were so soft and creamy that it was almost erotic.
Back and forth, that brush moved. He felt himself stiffen. His back seized as
the flames jumped and sputtered. The smell of burning butter and burning flesh
filled the air.
“God, Jesus, no…”
An enormous head moved very close to him, just outside of
his field of vision. Fire (eyes shut), forest (eyes open), the stars. There was
a wet smacking sound as a great mouth opened and the stench of rotting flesh as
it spoke.
“And now you understand,” it said.
His stomach lurched as he was lifted off of the spit,
sailing skyward, and then descending toward that great black mouth open wide
and those teeth, so jagged, diseased and black with rot. His legs slid down
that vast tongue like it was a slide. The teeth sank into his belly and he
screamed.
And then his eyes snapped open.
He was alone, on the rocks near the edge of the mountain
stream, under the watch of the stars in the night sky. He kept feeling for
rope, for burns, for blood, but of course there was none. A dream. Just a
dream.
He sat up straight and yelped in pain. Reaching around to
the back of his head, he felt a bloody goose egg there, just under his hair. He
was cold and alone. No fire. No Ogre.
“Bleeding Christ,” he whispered, the remnants of the
nightmare still rustling in his brain. It was a long time before he began to
walk, but when he did, he did so briskly and with sure purpose.
He would never return to these mountains.
It was more than five years before he returned to university
to lecture and more than ten years before, in a lecture entitled How a Man is
Measured, he told the story of the Ogre.
When he did, this is what he said.
“The Ogre, as he was called, is said to have devoured dozens
of men, women, and children in his time, including the members of his own
family.”
One student, a bit young, went pale.
“That happened because of an unexpected harsh winter. Some
say that he regretted it later, that it happened when his brain was fevered,
and that this act of sickness and desperation weighed upon him until the last
of his days. Others say that his laughter following the horror echoed across
the mountains, for the murder of his own blood proved that none were safe from
him.”
Here Philip paused.
“Who among us has no blackest moment in his life to speak
of? Yes, yes, you snickering in the front, I’m certain you’ve never tasted the
blood of an infant.” He approached the student and said, “But you have tasted…”
here he leaned forward and whispered directly into the student’s ear. The
student went pale and stared, unblinking.
“You… you couldn’t… nobody was…”
Philip waved his hand dismissively and returned to the front
of the lecture hall.
“Now, it happened that one day, as he was advancing in
years, Ogre was walking along a road. He saw a leper curled up in the dust, in
the position of the fetus, so that his bare, scabbed toes nearly touched his
own chin. He thought the man dead. But, as he began to walk away, he heard a
gurgling crackle that sounded like ‘water.’ He turned and saw the leper sitting
up, filthy rags barely covering him. His face was running with sores.”
The student who had gone pale got up and left the lecture
hall at this point.
“The snow-capped peaks are not all this world has to offer,”
Philip shouted, but the weak-stomached student was too far gone to hear. He
continued with his lecture.
“The cannibal leaned in closer to the leper and the leper,
once more, asked for water. ‘No,’ was the reply. He turned to go. ‘Again, I
beg, water,’ said the leper. ‘Again, I say, no.’ He had his hand on his
traveling axe by now. The leper shuffled
along behind him, too far gone with sickness to worry about the axe.”
Philip paused here to drink from his own cup of water.
“The Ogre raised his axe. He who had dined on the supple
flesh of beautiful youth saw nothing in the leper to whet his appetite, only an
annoyance to be rid of. But then, something unexpected occurred. The leper
said, ‘In the name of Mary, I beg you, water.’ Hearing the name of the Queen of
Heaven invoked, he lowered his weapon. Now, you might find this strange. We are
speaking of a man who once split the skull of a priest with the very same
crucifix that man of the cloth had been carrying. There is nothing in the prior
history of the Ogre to suggest that religion meant anything to him. So his next
actions are a mystery. And, yet, this is what he did. He gazed directly into
the soft, blue-blurred orbs that were the leper’s eyes. Finally, he spoke.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘In the name of Mary, I will give you water.’ He handed the
leper the final few drops he had reserved for his journey home. He left his
goatskin in the hands of the leper - he did not want it back after those lips
had been pressed to it - and he walked away, his great footfalls echoing in the
distance.”
Philip (or Professor von Hohen, as he was now known) then
dismissed his students. For a long while, he sat in silence, as though he were
contemplating the mystery, as a man of academia ought to do. But the truth is
that he wasn’t contemplating anything at all.
He was simply tired.
Decades passed. In the castle, long away, the great man grew
old. Much of his size was shed in time, so much so that a withered husk of
bones and loose skin was all that remained, shivering under fine sheets from
distant lands in the cold winter nights.
He had long since ceased his rounds of polishing his
trophies of war, ceased his contemplations in the room of three dozen
skeletons, including those of his family. His season was near its close.
The vast bed, which he once shared with a wife, and later,
after she was gone, with bountifully bosomed lasses bedded as many as three at
a time, seemed to envelope him in its immensity.
He thought back on the days when life had been too easy.
When the questions – Could I best this man? Could I kill this man? Could I take
what I want to take from him? – were far too easy to answer. Yes and yes and yes,
repeated ad infinitum.
He realized that, long ago, boredom had overtaken his long
life.
It was strange to him. When he walked the battlefields, the
smell of bitter smoke and blood invigorating him, he thought only of what he
could take. But in the quiet of his home, years later, alone, after his leg had
finally failed to heal after one injury too many, he often wondered: of what
use to him was any of it?
He owned many books and he tried to read them – in his
youth, he was well educated – but he found that his eyes no longer focused
well, so the words swam in a murky swirl of ink on the pages. This was
annoying, so he gave up on it. He had his memories, after all, and he found
that they were usually enough.
So he walked the silent halls of his home, pausing here and
there to lift, perhaps, copper-gilted iron, mail, and silk gusoku from his
trophy case. He closed his eyes and, as if by magic, he was once again a young
man on a faraway island in the East, snapping the neck of the warrior who had
worn it. He smiled, seeing the cobalt blue of the sky and those distant haunted
mountains reflected across the water as clearly as if he were still there
today. Then, he would return the armor to its place and wander over to the wall
to place his hands on the cheek of a lion, frozen mid-roar, and to again close
his eyes and return to the Serengeti.
These were his stories and his library was vast.
He began to send Those Who Walk in Shadow out into the world
to gift the people with gold, leave piles of coins beside hearths or stacks of
precious metals in haylofts, to be discovered in the morning. And if a farm
wife or two occasionally caught sight of the skeletal benefactors and dropped
dead of fright, well, chalk that up to old habits dying hard.
When the colors of the leaves turned in autumn, he would
walk the trails outside of his home and he would wonder about the lives and the
stories of the people who found the gold, how they would explain it to
themselves.
The words good and evil had always seemed like nursery babble
in his mind. But now he began to wonder.
Late one night, in utter blackness, as the wind howled
outside the stone and glass and stuff of wealth, he felt a great pinching
across his once mighty chest. He curled into the position of the fetus, fingers
clutching his nightshirt.
He was old. His teeth were gone. His arms and legs had
become as thin as branches stripped bare in winter.
In the darkness, he listened to his own heart. Two strong
steady thumps, then silence, then a skittering run of beats. The room around
him seemed to swim, as though he were at the bottom of a fishbowl.
Gaunt shapes, jagged at the edges, slipped into the shadows
in the far corners of the room. Something rattled loose within him, seemed to
slip up to his lips and hover there, in wait.
A set of scales appeared in the corner of the room. He no
longer could discern if what was happening was real or just the torn edges of a
nightmare still fluttering in his mind.
A solemn figure stood beside the scales, placing, one by
one, the bones of the dead on one plate. On the other was dripped the few drops
of water that he had, only once, in an act of charity, placed in the mouth of
the lowliest of men.
The wisp aglow on the lips of the man who had once been
called the Ogre was a small thing indeed in the dark and the cold and it could
do nothing more than wait to see what the scales would show when they came to
rest.

About the Author: Hundreds of years ago, alchemist and scribe Jason A. Zwiker
succumbed to strange mists while wandering through caves off the shores of Lake
Huron. He awakened in a terrifying yet fascinating future realm and is striving
to learn its ways. His short stories have appeared in numerous publications
including All Hallows: The Journal of the Ghost Story Society and Eureka
Literary Magazine. He also writes non-fiction for magazines and newspapers. He
currently lives in Charleston, SC and has an amazing daughter, a talented
girlfriend, and two cats, named Thor and Loki. Follow him on Twitter @jazstory.